Finding Redemption

by Desiree Holt

  Again, Tonio just stood there, but Ethan could see him processing the words, trying to decide what to do.

  “If that’s so,” the man said at last, “what does it mean to you? You’re just a gringo down here for whatever reason. If my family and I are dead tomorrow, your life still goes on.”

  “I need information,” Ethan told him. “I told you that. You give it to me, and I’ll have you and your family out of here before daylight.”

  “You give your word?” Tonio watched Ethan’s face.

  Ethan nodded. “My word is good. It’s not to my advantage to lie to you. Dead bodies don’t make people trust you.”

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “Did Las Tormentas engineer a kidnapping three months ago across the border? In Florida?”

  He’d be able to tell if Tonio tried to bluff him. He’d cut his losses and walk away. But the frightened man answered him truthfully.

  “Yes. To my shame.” His face twisted with misery. “You have to believe me that we don’t usually take children.”

  “I’m looking for that boy, Tonio. Eight years old.” Ethan watched Tonio carefully. The telltale flicker in the man’s eyes told him he was on the right track. “Here’s his picture.” He held out the photo Lisa had given him. “This is the one you and your people kidnapped in Tampa, Florida, right? And took to some place in the Quintana Roo. His mother is desperate to get him back.”

  Tonio said nothing, just shifted his feet and stared out at the Gulf of Mexico as if deciding what to say next.

  “Tonio.” Ethan softened his voice. “You have a child yourself. How would your wife feel if that child was ripped from her arms and taken far away?”

  Tonio fidgeted. “If you don’t get us out of here, that is liable to happen. Or else Cortez will kill us all, and not in a nice way.”

  “I told you,” Ethan insisted. “It’s a done deal. Just give me the information.”

  At last, the man nodded, just a sharp jerk of his head.

  “I will tell you what you want.” He blew out a breath. “Las Tormentas was hired to kidnap a small boy in Florida. And yes, this is him.”

  An unexpected thrill of excitement tickled Ethan’s nerves. Lisa’s son! Now maybe within their reach.

  “And?” he prompted.

  “Cortez received a million dollars for getting the boy and handing him over to a man who owns a huge finca, a plantation, deep in the Quintana Roo”

  “Who was the man?” Ethan demanded.

  “I don’t know his name, but Cortez knew him.” Tonio frowned. “I think they do some other business together.”

  “Drug business?” Ethan probed.

  Tonio shrugged.

  “Can you give me directions to the finca?”

  “When we meet I can bring you a map.”

  Ethan swallowed a smile. This kid wanted to make sure help would really be waiting for him. “All right. Hang on a minute.”

  He walked a few feet away, pulled out the cell phone again, and speed-dialed Nick. “It’s a go.”

  “You got the information?” Nick asked.

  “As much as he could give me. Now I have to get him and his family out of here before they’re slaughtered.”

  “Okay.” Nick spoke to someone in the room, then came back to the conversation. “Take him to Sunfish Charters at the end of the pier where you are. They’re good people. They’ve done some black work for Guardian a time or two. And be on time, because they won’t be able to hang around.”

  “Okay. Got it. No problem.” Finished with the call, he separated the battery from the phone and put each piece in different pockets. “It’s all set,” he said to Tonio. “Go home and get your wife and child. Do you know Sunfish Charters? At the very end of the row of marinas?”

  Tonio nodded. “Si.”

  “Meet me there at five-thirty a.m. That’s only a few hours from now.”

  “And you’ll take us away from here?” Tonio had a look in his eyes halfway between fear and pleading.

  Ethan nodded. “I have friends who will get you away from Cancun. Take you to the United States. There’ll be a job for you and a place for you and your family to live. If you want it, that is.”

  “What about the immigration people? And green cards? No green card and I can’t work.”

  Ethan tamped down his impatience. “My friends are taking care of all that. And one of them will have a job for you, too. A good paying one, working at the marina.” He watched Tonio through narrowed eyes. “Well? Time’s running out here.”

  Tonio seemed about to say something, then nodded his head. “I have no reason to trust you, but I also have no choice. We’ll be there.”

  “And if you can, draw a map of where the plantation is and how to get to it.”

  Ethan waited until Tonio had trudged off to his car in the parking lot and pulled out onto the street before he went back inside the cantina.

  Lisa was in the same place he’d left her, wedged in at one end of the bar, sipping from a glass that was still mostly full. The man on her left was doing his best to engage her in conversation, and Ethan could tell she was holding her own. The more time he spent with her, the more he realized just what a gutsy person she was. How the hell she’d ever gotten mixed up with someone like Charles Mallory still puzzled him.

  He stepped up behind her and tapped her shoulder. “Time to split, honey bun. Too much noise here.”

  Lisa turned, threw her arms around his neck, and smashed her mouth against his. “I was just telling this…gentleman…here we’re on our honeymoon, and you’d be coming right back in for me.”

  He pulled her tight against him. “That’s right. And we’re wasting too much of it in public. I think we’ve had enough night life, don’t you?” He leered at her.

  A smile teased the corners of her mouth. “Whatever you say, sweetie.”

  Ethan guided her to the door with his arm wrapped tightly around her. He could feel the eyes of the man at the bar raking over him. A stranger? Someone who’d followed them? In any event, they needed to get out of there pronto.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lisa felt the tension vibrating in Ethan’s body as he walked her across the bumpy parking lot to their car. The urge to hurry was in his hard grip on her arm and his deliberate, measured breathing, but he made them stroll as lovers would. She reached for a calm that she was far from feeling. When they got in the car, she turned to ask him a question, but he put his fingers to his lips and shook his head.

  When they were five blocks from Juana’s, he turned off onto a side street, pulled to the curb, and killed the lights.

  “Don’t move,” he mouthed.

  Lisa nodded, trying to hold back the fear that sat like a ball of lead in her stomach.

  He unscrewed the overhead light, then in the darkness of the car, he searched every inch with his fingertips, even the column of the steering wheel. When he’d completed the front, he moved to the back. Lisa fought her impatience while he did his thing, wishing he’d get around to telling her what had happened.

  At last, he was back in the front seat, starting the engine and pulling away from the curb.

  “Okay. Now we talk.”

  “What were you doing?” she asked.

  “Looking for bugs.”

  “Bugs?” Lisa’s eyebrows rose to her hairline. “Like in the hotel?”

  He nodded. “Or a GPS tracker. I wanted to make sure no one zeroed in on us while we were inside Juana’s and decided to put listening devices in the car, or track us. So far so good.”

  “Did he show up? The man from La Mama’s? Will he help us?”

  “Yes.”

  She waited for him to say something else. Finally, she said, “And?”

  “And he told me what we need to know. I made arrangements to get him and his family out of here, and we have some things to do, too.”

  “You know where Jamie is.” She tried to keep the excitement from her voice.

  “In a manner of
speaking. He’s alive, just as you thought, and—”

  “Ohmigod!” She took a deep, sobbing breath. “Thank god. Thank god.”

  “Yes, well, we have to get him out of there while he still is. Tonio said they turned him over to some man who has him at a huge finca in the middle of the Quintana Roo jungle. That man is the one who hired them.” He turned to look at her. “Can you think of any man who’d want Jamie badly enough to kidnap him and keep him?”

  Lisa felt the edges of fear claiming her again. “I have no idea who would do that.”

  “Maybe some enemy Charles had?” he pushed.

  “Oh, God.” The fear was tight in her throat. “Would he… Do you think he’s killed Jamie? Whoever he is?”

  Ethan shook his head. “If he wanted to kill him, he wouldn’t have paid Cortez half a mil to kidnap him. And if it’s an old enemy of Charles’s, if he wanted some kind of revenge or to send you a message, he’d have had him shot in front of you.”

  Her stomach heaved, and the nausea she worked hard to keep at bay threatened to erupt. “What would anyone want with an eight-year-old boy? Besides, Charles has been dead for four years. They got whatever money I could lay my hands on, so what’s the point?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Sending a message. Don’t fuck with me or your family isn’t safe.”

  “After all this time?”

  He shrugged. “It’s possible they’re having trouble with someone else, and you’re just the example they want to set.”

  “That’s why you’re getting that man and his family out of here,” she guessed. “So they can’t go after him.”

  He nodded. “He’s the weak link in that band of guerillas, the only one I could approach. It might not have worked with anyone else. He’s the most needy and the most desperate. Lisa, you know there’s one more possibility.”

  She’d had a sense of that possibility the more they got into this. At first, she’d dismissed it as foolish, but now… “You think Charles is alive. That the body wasn’t his and he has Jamie.”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it? He’s made a clean getaway, and now he wants his son.”

  “And the ten million that he cleverly tied up in life insurance with a clause.”

  Ethan nodded. “Don’t fall apart on me, okay?”

  She sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. “I won’t. But I might kill the son of a bitch myself.”

  He chuffed a laugh. “That’s my girl.”

  He pulled into an alley, got out, and put something under the front wheels. Then he got in and drove over whatever it was twice before picking it up and climbing back in the car.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Destroying a cell phone. I can’t make any more calls from it, so I crushed it, just in case.” He drove around to the back of a restaurant and pitched the phone into a trash bin. A few blocks later, he repeated the same procedure with the battery.

  “So they can’t trace it,” she guessed.

  “Yes. Those things are too easy to triangulate.”

  She frowned. “But what if we need to make calls again? You said your friends would help us if we needed them.”

  “All taken care of.”

  A million questions banged around in her head, but one look at Ethan told her he was in no mood to give answers right now. Anyway, it was time to stop questioning everything he did. There was no longer any doubt in her mind that he knew what he was doing.

  He headed back toward the beach and parked in a crowded lot at the far end of the row of marinas, then killed the engine and lights.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Now we wait.”

  “Here?”

  He nodded. “I’m in a good spot to see what’s happening, and no one can sneak up on us.”

  The silence stretched between them in the darkness of the car, thicker than cotton stuffing. The tension vibrating in the air came from more than one source.

  From the moment they’d entered La Mama’s, Lisa had been on edge, just as she sensed Ethan was. The air was thick with the sense of danger, she knew one wrong word, one false step, and they could both be dead. The unexpected was always waiting around a corner.

  But as her confidence in him grew, so did her belief that whatever had happened on that last op, he as in no way to blame. With each passing moment, she saw the Marine, the security agent, the black ops specialist come to life again. And it shocked her to realize this was a man she could respect, one who hid behind a persona carefully calculated to turn people off.

  There was another reason she moved as close to the door as she could, however, putting as much space between them as the seat allowed. The kisses she and Ethan had exchanged might have been for the benefit of an audience, but there was more than playacting behind them. They both knew it even if neither of them said it out loud. This wasn’t something they should be exploring right now.

  Maybe never.

  She hadn’t realized just how vulnerable she was or how afraid she was of a man’s touch.

  Thank you, Charles Mallory, for screwing up my life in more ways than one.

  She closed her eyes and tried to think of anything except the man sitting next to her. Jamie’s face kept swimming to the forefront, and she dug her nails into her hands to keep herself from crying. No time for tears now.

  Finally, she turned to look at Ethan. “How much longer do we sit here?”

  He spoke without taking his gaze from the windshield and whatever he was watching out there. “Not much. We’re waiting for another hour to pass. Then we’re going to a marina where, hopefully, my friend will have a boat waiting for Tonio and his family along with some equipment for me. And Tonio will have a map we need.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. “I hope.”

  “A map to show us how to get to wherever Jamie is?”

  Ethan nodded. “This could still be a trap. I want to make sure Tonio isn’t just selling us out to Cortez. That’s always a very real possibility in a situation like this. Whoever’s behind this—whoever hired this guerilla group to kidnap Jamie—doesn’t want us to find him. We have no idea what they might have told Cortez to do to keep people from looking too hard. We just have to operate as if there’s a shooter behind every rock.”

  They lapsed into silence again. Lisa tried to sit as still as possible, but her body was tensed to spring at a moment’s notice. It didn’t help that the damn wig was like a hot blanket on her head. Every sound, every movement made her jump. She kept her purse open with her hand on her gun, and she noticed Ethan had slid his own weapon from the small of his back and kept it on the seat next to him, hand resting on the grip.

  At last, Ethan cranked the engine and slid out of the parking lot, leaving his lights off until they hit the street. He drove at a normal pace to the other end of the row of marinas, checking all his mirrors on the way to be sure once more they weren’t being followed. He drove into another parking lot, this one dark and silent, and pulled up to a chain link fence. A sign that proclaimed Sunfish Charters, Keep Out, This Means You in faded black paint on a dingy white background hung on the padlocked gate.

  Ethan flashed his lights twice, and they got out of the car.

  A man dressed in black jeans and black T-shirt materialized from a tiny shack on the other side of the fence, nodded to Ethan, and unlocked the gate. They shook hands silently, and Ethan urged Lisa into the dock area ahead of him. The man’s eyes swept over her in an assessing gaze, but Ethan made no move to introduce them.

  “Are we all set?” Ethan kept his voice to a whisper.

  “Yes. Everything arrived a half hour ago, and the boat’s ready.” He looked over Ethan’s shoulder, frowning. “Where’s your extract?”

  “He’ll be here any minute. I wanted to get here first.” Ethan turned to Lisa. “I want you to wait in the office over there until I come for you. Don’t talk to anyone and don’t ask questions. Take your purse with your gun in it.”

  She opened her
mouth to say something, but the sudden deadly air surrounding both men made her close it again. She just nodded. This was for Jamie. For him, she could follow orders. And neither Ethan nor this man all in black looked like they wanted to hear anything she had to say.

  The so-called office was little more than a tiny room with a battered desk and chair. But along one wall were steel cabinets with heavy locks. Not your average fishing charter equipment.

  Two tiny windows gave visual access to the marina and parking lot. Through one of them, she could see the two men walk to the end of the dock. A third man, also in black, climbed out of a boat, and he, too, shook hands with Ethan. Then he reached into the boat and hauled out a large canvas that looked heavy, along with a smaller, lighter one. Ethan carried them back up the dock to the parking lot.

  The air these people projected was calmly lethal. Lisa wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse. No amount of deep breathing would dissolve the knots in her stomach, and she jammed her hands in the pockets of her dress to keep them from trembling. She had no doubt these were men he’d worked with in every facet of his life. He must have been the king of black ops.

  Nothing happened for the next few minutes, and Lisa did what had become a habit when she was nervous. She paced. Finally, a car pulled into the lot, and as soon as its headlights went off so did all the lights on the dock. Lisa opened her purse and took out her gun, trying to steady her hands. By straining her eyes, she managed to make out three people getting out of the car—two adults and a small child.

  A fourth shape joined them. Ethan. Then the entire black mass moved toward the dock. Lisa could no longer see them, but she heard the creaking of wood as they made their way to the boat at the end. Squinting, she could just see the outlines of Ethan and the man in the boat shaking hands again. Then the craft moved slowly out into the water, barely breaking a ripple on the surface, and two black shapes headed back toward the office.

  Lisa put her gun back in her purse, took another deep breath to control her erratic heartbeat, and wiped her hands on her skirt. She was standing by the door when it opened, and Ethan motioned to her.